Happy New FY – Let’s have a coffee and a catchup?

An update on the exciting changes and opportunities coming up!

Hello Friends, Members and supporters of BizBuddyHub. Yes, it has been a while since we sent out any comms and with good reason. Many of you know that we started BizBuddyHub to build a community who had an interest in collaborating and coworking locally. We tried very hard to join the dots on several underutilised local spaces in Wyndham to make this a reality. In the absence of suitable space, we have coworked in our homes, cafes and community centres and even at the recent Point Cook Pop Up Park.

Coworking in local cafes and restaurants remains a popular way for us all to catch up and build our peer to peer community. We continue to advocate for dedicated coworking spaces and a mixed-use Enterprise Hub, we are aware this needs significant stakeholder support to create fit for purpose space/s that will cater for corporate pods, dedicated offices and coworking that suits the outer metro environment. Locals have a myriad of skills that are both desk based, or food/craft/maker space based, and we are convinced a mixed-use enterprise hub is the way to go.

As you know, we have also built out a virtual toolkit designed to aggregate and promote our local businesses, skills, groups, events and products. We know that micro business do not have the time to adequately market, find new work, do the work and grow their business. We also know that collaboration is a much stronger system than competition at a micro level.

So what is next?

Recent changes in the environment have opened up opportunities for more community led projects and social procurement. But, this needs infrastructure and support to be able to benefit locals and we remain committed to our ethos of building social cohesion and local economy around collaboration.

With this in mind, we are in the process of creating a Not For Profit called CoLocal which will be the umbrella that BizBuddyHub operates under. This will allow us to build a structure that can seek out grants and tenders in the local environment and build a team of experts who can project manage community projects and local jobs that auspice local skills while focusing on the deliverables.

This structure is not designed to compete with anybody or any existing entity, but rather to be an intersect that helps connect the various structures, groups, entities in the local environment.

BizBuddyHub memberships will continue but so too will opportunities to be sponsors, partners, associates and ambassadors with free memberships for community groups and start ups and volunteer organisations.

Opportunities?

There is opportunity galore to get involved, for example the BizBuddyHub hosted coworking days need ambassadors who create a cluster of energy around them by skills or location. Think about creating your own community or group activities powered by BizBuddyHub!

We need to build a strong board of skills for CoLocal – People who are strategic, have Tender and Grant application skills, Legal skills, Governance Skills, Project Management Skills, Tech and Marketing etc.

We want to promote any space that wants to host coworking days or local events as part of the connected “Local” environment.

We need ideas people, those who are committed to building a strong local model that works for real people, whether you are part of an existing organisation or community group or an individual, we need to build a strong energy around solving local problems together.

Let’s Do this Together!

Rome wasn’t built in a day and we will be spending July-September building the governance structure, legal and compliance and working to launch in October so we want to hear from you Let’s get the right people around the table and make this come together in an inclusive and democratic way.